SPPatchify – CU patch entire farm from one script

Patching can be tedious and time consuming. Why not automate that? Who wants to be awake all night clicking “Next” and watching SP config wizard? So I coded a single PowerShell script to manage the full end-to-end patching process.

The script will …

Enable PowerShell client remoting. Connects to farm peer machines.

Autodetect current user password from IIS pools

Download Microsoft Cumulative Update (CU) media (EXE +CAB) and copy to all servers. Optionally, you can download to the \media\ sub folder manually.

The script uses Get-SPServer to auto detect farm members. That enables CU media copy sideways to peers and the stop/start of SharePoint services. Get-SPContentDatabase is exported to a local CSV file to “snapshot” before patching and later Mount-SPContentDatabase step to present databases again. The big goal isn’t zero downtime, but rather minimal downtime.

The entire farm patching process can be managed from one PowerShell window. Enjoy!